Warren Redlich has a video with renderings Kimi Talvitie has made of SpaceX Starship 2.0 with an 18 meter diameter.
Starship would only have 6 raptor engines and have a range of about 10,000 miles. However, an 18-meter wide Starship 2.0 would have 20 raptor engines and would be able to go anywhere on earth in under one hour.
It would be single-stage which would be safer than two-stage rockets. there would be no dangers or complications from a stage separation.
20 raptor engines would allow for a lot of engines to be turned off if any problems were detected.
SOURCES- Warren Redlich, Kimi Talvitie
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
How about 30 meters–then you can have a monolithic Mars aerobrake
you are outdoing yourself Brian. We already have a fake upgrade to a fake rocket. How is to be an enabler to a fraud? Does Muskrats PR dpt. pay you for these shills?
It will burn anything beneeth it, and leave a fresh methane smell..
If for some reason it cannt maintain flight as in KSP, that fireball will be huge.
Could put an artificial gravity ship/base for the moon or asteroids on top.
More stable once landed. Centre of gravity is lower per height and width. Probably noticed on hopper test.
Don’t need to fold it. I would like them to throw as many 17 meters telescope as they could into space. That way we can monitor the entire universe looking for phenomena. At the right price, every university could afford one.
Clearly this means that a replica of Christ the Redeemer needs to be made and landed on the top of Olympus Mons ASAP.
N-1: 30 first stage engines
F9H: 27 first stage engines
The 1970s called on a rotary phone and said they want their assumptions back.
N-1
I’ve thought that too, for many years now. By using miles instead of time, the Apollo missions seem like the safest way to travel, and we know intuitively that can’t be right, even if you exclude the fatal Apollo 1 disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1, which never even left the ground. If you exclude all “test” flights, then Apollo 1 is excluded, and flying Apollo rockets is 100% safe, and that certainly can’t be right.
We spend far more time in cars than in planes, but we cover much less distance. It might take a year or more to drive the same distance of a single long-distance flight. It’s unlikely we’ll have a fatal accident in either mode in that time, but going simply by distance makes flying seem safer than it really is.
You are not the only person on the planet. Back when airlines got their start, it was exceedingly unsafe…but people shelled out large sums to fly. There are people who don’t live in fear of dying due to probability. Very easy to convince oneself that it will not happen to them. Probably the kind of people who smoke, jaywalk, ride motorcycles and eat doughnuts and fried bologna sandwiches every day.
That is the point. Mistakes will be much more common if there is no way to tell the difference.
There are ways to tell the difference between planes generally. We don’t use 747s and 707s and such. The military uses obvious troupe transport planes. Though, the government does transport military personnel in ordinary planes…but they don’t buy all the seats. It is still mostly civilians in there and a the plane is civilian.
If you used exactly the same planes or exactly the same rockets, you endanger the public needlessly.
And when things move very fast, there is no time to send up a fighter to get a closer look. They just have the binary choice: launch an intercepting missile or don’t and maybe get a city wiped out.
… and so, your honour, I was in fact driving more safely by doing 200 down the suburban side street because it reduced the amount of time that I was driving while intoxicated…
Well hopefully, it won’t need all 120 raptors all functioning optimally 100% of the launch times because that aint going to happen. Then there are the 20 second stage raptors. Calling this monstrosity a “Starship” is a stainless steel pipe dream.
Under that theory you can’t use aeroplanes for troop transport because people will shoot down airliners.
Doesn’t stop anyone from using air transport for troops.
And when someone does shoot down an airliner every decade or two, it’s because they thought it was a bomber, not a troop transport.
Bigelow could find a use…If you thought the BA 2100 was big, just wait for the BA 10,000!
:p
In part larger rockets benefit from increased sectional density; As they get bigger, you’ve got more mass and power per unit of frontal area, so pushing through the atmosphere becomes more efficient. But, that’s mostly due to the increased length, once you reach the maximum height for a given rocket technology, you stop gaining on that front.
Also, as the rocket gets larger, the necessary responsiveness of the control system declines; You have more time to respond to slight changes in attitude. You gain the potential for redundancy, loss of a single engine becomes less of an issue.
Larger rockets have logistics advantages; 10 tons or 10,000, the rocket is likely to consume the same launch clearance.
Radiation shielding scales well, you’re protecting a volume, and doing it with a surface. But eventually you run into problems with cooling.
Downsides also scale, though: The cost of losing a single rocket goes up as a fraction of your company’s revenue stream. Safety ranges increase with the fuel load.
If you’re using aerobraking, at some point sectional density gets too high; The heat load per square meter of skin is proportional to the mass behind that meter.
If you’re pushing through the atmosphere, the front of your rocket has to be pointed, which implies a maximum diameter if you have a maximum height. I’d guess the Starship would max out at maybe 40 meters in diameter, for this reason alone.
That was based on a static launch rate of exactly 114 orbital launches per year, zero growth.
Isn’t it a bit too soon to call orbital launch rates as going exponential? I think the best supported case is the market just expanded in 2018.
2010 74(4)
2011 84(6)
2012 78(6)
2013 81(3)
2014 92(4)
2015 86(5)
2016 85(3)
2017 90(6)
2018 114(3)
2019 62(6)**
China and Russia would throw a hissey fit. Can you say orbital bomber. Just 2 of these would have more firepower than the entire conventional arsenal of the Chinese Navy. 4 equals the entire US navy if very SSBN was converted into a cruise missile sub. USAF should be salivating. Alas, Baby Boomers run things and don’t embrace tech.
If you are going to use this on Earth for ordinary travel you don’t want it used for military, because then paranoid countries could easily confuse a passenger rocket for a troupe rocket resulting in 1,000 dead tourists. Big Fat Target.
There might be less threatening military uses though. Perhaps rotating sailors on aircraft carriers out in the ocean at peacetime. No need to go to port…unless it needs maintenance. If you can land smaller version on barges, no reason you can’t land the monsters on aircraft carriers. Does require some adaptation. You need a very strong landing area, and you need the fuel to refuel the rocket…unless it carries enough for both ways…which might make some admirals and captains a bit nervous. Better to land near empty, I think. Obliterating a carrier is probably not good for business.
Other then the fun aspect of digging into the numbers…it’s pointless.
Elon changed his mind a lot with the original starship, and will continue to do so until it is done…and probably even after that, lol.
It will certainly take some time for the payload developers to catch up to Elon. This actually provides quite an opportunity for disruptive innovation in the payload industry, which Elon is already doing with Starlink. Imagine being able to pack a space telescope with a mirror 17 meters in diameter unfolded and 34 meters if folded like the JWST! And packing fully assembled hab modules that are 17 meters (56 feet) in diameter! Interesting stuff.
We need big boring machines on Mars to make large tunnels, and big Earthmovers. Should that be Marsmovers? Stone crushers are needed as well for mining and materials for making stuff like brick. It may also be possible to just move big stuff on Earth that can’t be moved by ship because it needs to be placed inland. Things like reactor cores, transformers, large telescope mirrors and refinery equipment.
Also, sometimes you want stuff that will be used in very dreadful climate, but it is asking a lot to have it built in place…like in Antarctica. Some huge modular thing could be built in a pleasent climate and the components delivered even at the South Pole. Good practice for Mars as well. It might be useful for moving emergency supplies in a major disaster anywhere on the planet in a couple hours. You just have a warehouse with everything already packaged for movement by these big rockets. So, you only have to figure out what you need, load up the rocket, fuel it and off it goes.
Interesting stuff on the minimum gauge. I think the early Atlas rocket was using your idea of static pressure helping with vertical compression strength in that it was a balloon tank that would get much weaker if it lost internal pressure, to the point that it actually collapsed on the launch pad when it lost too much pressure. The pressure helped prevent buckling. And its interesting that those were the only other rockets made out of stainless steel like Starship that I know of.
I will say, though, that the one thing that the article got right, and is reflected in the renderings, is the fact that the height is restricted by the lift pressure that the rocket’s engines can generate. So the rendering shows the Starship 2.0 as being fatter but not taller than 1.0. I don’t think it is quite that restricted that they can’t go a little bit higher, even 50% higher, but their is a real restriction. But if they did keep it the same height, then the increase in the weight of the booster’s cylindrical walls should remain at four fold with a doubling in vehicle width. Then it would be neutral, as in doable but no direct advantage in vehicle weight to fuel.
It’s even worse. If tank pressure in fuel tanks, absent gravity, dominates dry mass requirements, then the scaling is neutral. But when acceleration is factored in, it becomes negative. Structure lower on the rocket must support everything above it, and “everything above it” scales with height. So doubling the overall scale could increase the theoretical minimum dry structure mass by a factor of eight.
That being the case, why are large rockets more economical than small ones? Two main factors. First, the extra scaling penalty for height over which load must be supported doesn’t really apply when the tank pressure is much greater than the gravity or acceleration-induced pressure in the fuel and oxidizer that the tanks must contain. The extra mass needed for pressure containment serves to deliver support for extra load times distance “for free”. So for all practical purposes, we’re back to neutral scaling.
Second, there’s a practical issue known as “minimum gauge”. Originally applied to the minimum thickness of sheet metals that it was feasible to weld, it got generalized to include minimum bulk that parts needed to stand up to machining and handling forces. It’s a fuzzy concept; one can’t define it theoretically, as it depends on manufacturing methods and procedures. But in practical terms, it looms large. It make it impractical to build small rockets that approach theoretical minimum mass. Big ones, though, no problemo.
Just as with extrapolating from a mouse to an elephant, the structural supporting mass percentage-wise would need to be increased relative to the overall mass. Conversely, stronger materials could be substituted for building a space-faring whale.
You’re off by a factor of 1000. You charged the failure with 1000 deaths, but didn’t credit the non-failures with 1000 passengers delivered safely. The result of one death per hundred million passenger-kilometers is actually quite favorable.
I’ve often wondered if there was some adjustment that would make sense. For airplanes for example the most dangerous part is taking off and landing. Taking off, flying 100 miles, and landing 10x should be more dangerous than taking off and flying 1000 miles and landing.
Or two fully loaded landers the size of a C-5 Galaxy
What kind of payload would need the 2.0 version? I am think a geosynchronous spy satellite with a big ass mirror. Or maybe just rocket fuel for going to Mars. Maybe a Martian space station.
The army could buy a few for moving troops.
It is a bit unclear what is being said in the article due to the lack of details, but it seems there is a claim that scaling up will give a weight advantage. However, the formulas behind some of the statements are not correct according to what I used in scale model testing for the navy. The rules of scaling are neutral when referring to pressure based forces such as you have in pressure vessels like a rocket or submarines. For instance, if you scale-up a submarine by say two then it will have the same crush depth as the original sub, keeping the ratio of hull diameter and wall thickness the same. So although the thickness goes up by only a factor of two, if you double the scale the cross-sectional area of the tank [Edit: as in the tank wall’s cross-section] goes up by four, exactly as the cross-sectional area of the tank [Edit: as in fluid cross-section] does because both are based on the formula of the area of a circle which is pir^2. This assumes that hydrostatic forces in the tank are the main controlling forces, but since the crush forces from the thrust will increase by a factor four as well, then it seems you will not be able to get around having four times as much material in the walls.
what weights 2,000,000 pounds or 1,000 tons? It’s about one-and-three-fifths times as heavy as Christ the Redeemer (statue).
That’s great… now we can send the “Christ monolith” to mars… or 8 whales…. the choice is yours…
I think you’re failing to take into account the need for anti-slosh plates in larger, squatter tanks.
Most people have no idea of what exponential growth really means and can not picture it in their heads..
You forgot, things are getting better exponentially now. I am sure that is a linear projection. /s
In 2018 there were 114 orbital launches with 3 failures.
At that rate and assuming no further failures, best case scenario, you will have your first eligible trip in ~88 years.
Why? I want to evaluate my transportation options for going between points A and B. Not for X hours of travel.
Most common metrics are actually sensible.
Risk of accident should be a factor of time traveling rather than distance traveled
A vehicle with 1000 passengers that crashes on 10001 trip (your trip) at 10000 km (1e3 deaths per 1e8km) would make the safety level roughly (statistically far from precise) two orders of magnitude more lethal than motorcycle, and 5~6 orders more lethal than civil aviation. That means you will never be ready to travel by rocket.
I’m prepared to travel by rocket when there have be 10,000 trips without a passenger fatality.